THE UNSUNG GENIUS OF JOHN VON NEUMANN
Shiva Saravanan, A&M Consolidated High School
Von Neumann. The name permeates science, from von Neumann algebras to von Neumann cellular automata and seemingly everything in between. He was described by contemporaries as the cleverest man they ever knew, a man of mental capabilities that far surpassed even Einstein’s. He was a creature of contradictions; unfailingly kind in personal life but violently harsh in politics. Such a varied and interesting life seems ripe for fame, yet von Neumann is hardly a household name, unable to penetrate popular culture in the same way as a Newton, Einstein, or Galileo. Why?
From the beginning of his life, it was apparent that Von Neumann was destined for greatness. The son of privileged, honorary nobility, he wanted for little in his early years and was surrounded by a family that valued education. His photographic memory manifested itself early — he would amuse his parents’ friends by instantly memorizing pages of phone books on command. He was capable of seemingly impossible feats of arithmetic and was able to learn Latin and Greek by himself.
Constantly thinking, rolling ideas and numbers around in his head, he was on a different plane of existence throughout his childhood. It was here that he developed his lifelong love of history, voraciously reading everything he could find and remembering everything he read — enough for him, as an amateur, to match professors of Byzantine history later in life. As he entered school, Von Neumann was several years ahead of his peers in mathematics; however, he also remained friendly and approachable to all of them. Unfailingly enthusiastic about learning, von Neumann could talk constantly about the latest subjects of his intellectual curiosity. Eugene Wigner, a future Nobel laureate who had gone to school with von Neumann, said that von Neumann “went on and on and [Wigner] drank it all in” and that conversations with von Neumann made him “realize the difference between a first-rate mathematician and [himself]” (Kuhn).
The son of a lawyer for one of Hungary’s largest banks, he enjoyed life in large apartments and estates, and his parents enrolled him in one of the best schools in Budapest. Around the dinner table, both von Neumann and his brothers were expected to participate in adult discussions, with topics ranging through all facets of life, from philosophy to art to science. In 1913, von Neumann’s father was bestowed with an honorary nobility, putting the von in the name of the Neumanns. With an incomparable, enthusiastic intellect unhindered by monetary concerns and fully supported by his family, von Neumann was on a straight path to greatness…or so it seemed.
In 1914, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was roiled by World War I. As the country rushed to fight, the 10-year-old von Neumann was initially untouched. His family was well-off, and neither he nor his brothers were of military age. He continued his studies at the Lutheran Gymnasium and with his tutors, and it seemed that even a war would not crimp his unstoppable rise. However, with the war’s end came the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the institutions that had supported von Neumann’s family.
The transitional government led by Mihaly Karolyi posed little threat to the family’s situation, but it was soon replaced by that of Bela Kun, the Lenin-trained leader of the Hungarian Communist party, who began the brief reign of the Hungarian Soviet Republic with an agenda to nationalize estates — estates like those owned by the Von Neumann family. Finally, the war began to directly threaten the young von Neumann, and the family soon fled their homeland to neighboring Austria, hoping to wait out the crisis. This experience marked a formative period in von Neumann’s political views, as his passionate anti-Communism was forged, an animus which he would carry for the rest of his life.
After a countercoup a few months later by Miklos Horthy, the von Neumann family returned to Hungary, yet their lives would never really be the same. Anti-Semitism was rife throughout the nation, and the new government encouraged much of it. Although Von Neumann was admitted to the University of Budapest in 1921, overcoming a Jewish quota, he was also pressured by his father to take a course in chemical engineering at the University of Berlin and Zurich Institute, and only attended Budapest for exams. Although von Neumann’s father wanted his son to have a practical career rather than an abstract one in mathematics, his efforts proved futile. Von Neumann would obtain his Ph.D. in mathematics, his true passion, in 1926, and would leave Hungary permanently to work at the University of Gottingen and lecture at Berlin as a privatdozent, an astonishing position for someone of such a young age.
He wasted no time in making history. As von Neumann put it, he felt “an external pressure on the whole society of this part of Central Europe, a subconscious feeling of extreme insecurity in individuals, and the necessity of producing the unusual or facing extinction”, driving him onward to produce as much success as possible in as little time as possible (Israel, Gasca 11). This “pressure” was one of his most defining character traits, as his entire life was spent trying to maximize his mental potential. Almost immediately after his hiring, von Neumann helped revolutionize physics by creating a probabilistic theory of quantum mechanics.
To this day, the mathematics underlying quantum theory can be traced back to von Neumann’s insights.
He published an astonishing 32 papers between 1927–1930 — nearly one paper per month. During the same period, his personal life soared when he fell in love with a childhood friend, Mariette, whom he eventually married in 1930. Von Neumann’s rocket into grandeur had resumed — yet a war loomed which would tear him from yet another home.
Von Neumann’s first split with Germany was not ideological but financial. Due to the low salaries and fierce competition in Germany, von Neumann accepted a professorship role at Princeton in 1929. Although he was offered tenure, von Neumann, a loyal son of Europe, declined and continued to divide his time between the United States and Germany. However, the 1933 ascent of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party prompted von Neumann to reevaluate his position. This was a new kind of government, one which would not allow someone like John von Neumann to escape from its clutches. Yet the Hungarian was one step ahead of them. Fearing what was to come and appalled by Hitler’s rise, von Neumann quickly resigned from the German Mathematical Society and decamped — to the United States.
Even across an ocean, with his continent falling under the shadow of Nazism, Von Neumann continued his relentless work at Princeton. He refined his analysis of statistical mechanics that he had begun in Germany. He worked, thought, published…even the self-imposed exile couldn’t repress his intellect. And some of his homes had come with him, for plenty of other German academics had made the same fateful leap as von Neumann — something that was not lost on him. In the midst of his work, he threw lavish parties at his house for exiles and fellow professors, seemingly an act of decadence but in reality one of generosity, for these parties were a way for him to help fellow Europeans gain an all-important support network. Von Neumann, even in America, was stronger than ever.
Yet in 1935, he and his wife had their first and only child, Marina von Neumann. Soon afterward, in 1937, they divorced, thrown apart because, in his daughter’s words, Von Neumann’s “first love in life was thinking”, making a marriage to him frustrating for anyone who wanted normal human interaction (von Neumann 21). Despite remarrying soon after, Von Neumann remained devastated by this loss for his entire life. He never truly let go of his first wife, and they wrote to each other like longing lovers even while divorcing. His remarriage would never live up to his first, golden romance, and he would never regain the happiness that he had once had. For once, the smartest man on Earth had encountered a challenge he couldn’t think his way out of.
But the world left him no time to mourn. The Axis powers marshaled their forces for a conquest of the world, and von Neumann threw himself into the battle of minds. He was convinced that the United States would and should intervene in the conflict, wholly trusting his newfound country to make the right choices and dismissing any who feared the beginnings of American imperialism.
He made major contributions to the Manhattan Project, suggesting an implosion technique for the atomic bomb that proved key to its success.
One of Von Neumann’s most revolutionary ideas during this period was sparked by his dissatisfaction with hide-bound traditional economics combined with his almost defiant willingness to see “order beyond the disorder” of seemingly chaotic systems (von Neumann 25). In 1944, he published Theory of Games, the founding text of game theory, the study of strategies and decisions, and in 1945, he continued his military innovations with the von Neumann architecture, showing that machines did not have to store memory and instructions in separate areas — and creating a template for the modern computer in the process. The war had driven von Neumann to even greater heights. Even after the loss of his wife, even after the fall of his ancestral home to Hitler, the genius still innovated. Perhaps it was an inevitability, a fact of life. Yet soon, von Neumann’s politics would entangle him in a web that far surpassed any of the challenges he had met to date.
After the war, the communist Soviet Union was the chief rival to the United States. Remembering the ravages of Bela Kun in his home, von Neumann threw himself into military advocacy, arguing strongly for an aggressive stance against the Soviets. Due to his key role during the war, Von Neumann had become the head of the Atomic Energy Commission and now used his position to push for increased anti-Soviet militarism. Sparked by von Neumann’s previous computing innovations and his forceful push against Oppenheimer’s call for restraint, the United States developed and tested a hydrogen bomb, the most powerful weapon in the world at the time. Von Neumann was adamant that nuclear weapons were made to be used, contrary to his pacifist contemporaries in science. The genius was ready for battle.
However, Von Neumann’s time on Earth was drawing to an end. Less than a decade into the Cold War, he was faced with an enemy that he could not fight with bombs — cancer. With no solutions, no more innovations, and no treatments able to stop the merciless disease, in 1955 his death became inevitable, and as Von Neumann neared his time to pass, a mind that had as a child been able to divide two eight-digit numbers was unable to even add two single-digit ones, as its genius faded into mere memory. Von Neumann had never encountered such fear and helplessness. Despite being vehemently agnostic for his whole life, he converted to Catholicism near his death, yet even this balm brought him no peace, as he continued to be tormented by his mortality. As his minutes ticked away on his deathbed, von Neumann gave his brother a word-for-word recitation of Faust, putting the last of his memory into one final leap. Then, John Von Neumann, one of the greatest geniuses in human history, passed away at the age of only 54.
So why is von Neumann not a popular legend? Why is the man responsible for the computer, game theory, and the hydrogen bomb languishing in relative obscurity? Perhaps the versatility that made von Neumann so special is his curse. He is not a person who can be associated with one thing or even one field. His contributions span many fields of endeavor and are often too abstract for an average person to understand. Perhaps it is because he doesn’t sell well. Von Neumann has no patent office or falling apple, he never dropped out of school or had to rise out of poverty. What defined him was his endless curiosity, his boundless wit, and his unceasing commitment to realize the full potential of his intellect, an intellect which surpassed all others, for John von Neumann was in every sense of the word a universal genius.
Bibliography
Blair, Clay. “Passing of a Great Mind.” LIFE, 25 Feb. 1957, pp. 89–104.
Dransfield, Robert; Dransfield, Don (2003). Key Ideas in Economics. Cheltenham: Nelson Thornes, 2003.
Henderson, Harry. Mathematics: Powerful Patterns Into Nature and Society. New York: Chelsea House, 2007.
Israel, Giorgio, and Ana Millan Gasca. The World as a Mathematical Game: John von Neumann and Twentieth Century Science. Birkhauser, 2009.
Kuhn, Thomas. “Eugene Wigner — Session I.” Eugene Wigner — Session I | American Institute of Physics, American Institute of Physics, 18 May 2015, www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/4963-1.
Von Neumann, Marina. The Martian’s Daughter: A Memoir. University of Michigan Press, 2012.
